The Nizhny Novgorod Institute of Education Development (NIED) has identified a contractor to carry out work to create an automated education management system in the Nizhny Novgorod Region. Having reduced the initial price from 20 million rubles to 19 million 800 thousand rubles, the contract was awarded to JSC "IRTech" from Samara, as reported on the government procurement website. The second auction participant, represented by Moscow LLC "Modern Technologies", offered 100 thousand more for the contract.

Meanwhile JSC "IRTech" was the developer of the technical project for the given purchase, to what the information remained in properties of the document placed together with the notice on purchase specifies. Alexander Fradkov who has created the statement of work takes a leading position in JSC IRTech.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Youth Policy of Nizhny Novgorod region, responding to "Kozy"'s inquiry on this fact, stated that during the preparation of the Terms of Reference for the Institute's procurement the documents from open sources on the Internet (created, which is remarkable, three weeks before the announcement of the tender) were allegedly used.

"It is possible that the properties of one of the documents used contains the name of a person who is not an employee of the customer organization. When preparing the ToR, information about previous authors of the document was not deleted. Thus, this fact is a consequence of a technical error", - commented on the situation in the ministry.

It should also be noted that two companies challenged the legality of the customer's actions in the FAS. In particular, LLC Dnevnik.ru indicated, among other things, that the ordered automated information system completely duplicates the functions of the previously purchased and already successfully functioning information system. Thus, on August 3, 2016 the Institute and PJSC Rostelecom concluded a government contract for the provision of services for the creation and implementation of a regional segment of the unified federal interdepartmental system of registration of the contingent of students under the main educational programs and additional general educational programs of the Nizhny Novgorod region. The contract in the amount of 4 million 200 thousand rubles, according to the applicant, was fulfilled and paid in full. All systems implemented by PJSC Rostelecom are currently in operation, and the state customer has been granted perpetual nonexclusive rights to this system.

"Moreover, the AIS Complete OOO of the Nizhny Novgorod Region was repeatedly upgraded based on government contracts, and technical support and maintenance were purchased. The last contracts for modernization and maintenance of this information system were concluded in November 2018, May 2019 and June 2019. All functions of the subsystems implemented in 2016 coincide with those of the subsystems, the purchase of which is currently announced", - is contained in a complaint of LLC Dnevnik.ru.

However, as emphasized in the Ministry of Education, November 21, in Nizhny Novgorod UFAS held a meeting to consider the complaints filed, which resulted in a decision to declare them unfounded. The texts of the antimonopoly body's decisions have not been made public so far.